Morford is Not Feeling Rapturous

We in the Bay Area have our own rational treasure, Mark Morford, who some on the right want drill a hole in this head. Here is an excerpt from a screed that is bound inflame his fanatic winger fandom - Why Does God Hate Caribou? / Drill for oil and screw Alaska's wildlife? Why, sure, all part of the imminent Rapture!:

A huge chunk of BushCo's voting bloc is evangelical or born-again Christian. Millions of otherwise decent and sincere Americans who actually believe the Bible as literal world-for-word truth, verbatim, no questions asked, not metaphor and not parable and not lovely set of nice, same-as-every-other-religion mythologies by which we set our moral compasses, but a set of actual facts told in cautionary dramedy, like a silly locust-ridden reality-TV show. Extreme Jesus: Apocalypse Edition.

And by many measures, the people who believe this are the same deeply terrified, misguided folk who tipped the electorate scale and put BushCo back in office, along with a great many other newly spawned power players in Washington and across the social strata, from judges to teachers to Cabinet members to congresspersons to the borderline insane Parents Television Council, people so terrified of the human female nipple that it screamed loud enough so that now uttering the word s-- on the radio will cost you $500,000.

So then. The evangelicals are in power, having their bleak and apocalyptic moment in the white-hot sun. And Bush, by all accounts, is their leader, their spokesman, their crusader, smashing those damned gays and repressing them uppity women and attacking those gul-dang Muslims and -- here's the kicker -- doing his God-sanctioned duty to bring about a grand holy war that will hasten the arrival of, you guessed it, Armageddon.

And baby, for any evangelical worth his secret homosexual fantasy, Armageddon is where it's at.

Do you see? This means that the war in Iraq is a good thing, because war brings us closer to the Final Conflict. War is what God wants. And nature, that pathetic and disposable handmaiden to humankind's happy bloodlust, is merely the fuel, the playpen, for that happy eventuality. Earth is but a finite resource given by God to humanity and meant to be all used up as fast as possible and the faster we use it all up the sooner Jesus comes. Just like Santa. Only, you know, not.

Put another way: The environment does not matter because the Earth does not matter because all the sinful nonbelievers do not matter and all that does matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ, and therefore, so what if BushCo supports the most appalling array of environmentally abusive polices in American history? So what if we permanently scar some silly wildlife refuge in Alaska?

So what if Dubya wants to gut the EPA and the Clean Air Act and clean water and wants to log national forests and relax all major pollution regulations on his buddies in big industry? It's all just a matter of time, anyway, until it's all over (most predictions put the Second Coming somewhere between the next 12 seconds and within 40 years). And in the meantime, while the believers wait, God will provide. Simple!

What's really scary is these people want to hurry up the end of the world and they have the political power to make it happen!